What Did Dell EMC Announce Dell EMC announced their initial product, platform solutions, and services for Azure Stack. This includes a Proof of Concept (PoC) starter kit (PE R630) for doing evaluations, prototype, training, development test, DevOp and other initial activities with Azure Stack. Dell EMC also announced a larger for production deployment, or large-scale development, test DevOp activity turnkey solution. The initial production solution scales from 4 to 12 nodes, or from 80 to 336 cores that include hardware (server compute, memory, I/O and networking, top of rack (TOR) switches, management, Azure Stack software along with services. Other aspects of the announcement include initial services in support of Microsoft Azure Stack and Azure cloud offerings.

What Did Dell EMC Announce Dell EMC announced their initial product, platform solutions, and services for Azure Stack. This includes a Proof of Concept (PoC) starter kit (PE R630) for doing evaluations, prototype, training, development test, DevOp and other initial activities with Azure Stack. Dell EMC also announced a larger for production deployment, or large-scale development, test DevOp activity turnkey solution. The initial production solution scales from 4 to 12 nodes, or from 80 to 336 cores that include hardware (server compute, memory, I/O and networking, top of rack (TOR) switches, management, Azure Stack software along with services. Other aspects of the announcement include initial services in support of Microsoft Azure Stack and Azure cloud offerings.

Microsoft is adding the commercial version of the Docker Engine into Windows Server 2016, continuing the company's efforts to reach out to include Linux in its plans. The announcement, made this morning at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, coincides with the official launch of Windows Server 2016, which is due to reach general availability in October. It means that Docker will now run on Windows, but in a way, it's also a step in Microsoft's efforts to keep Azure open. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has not only embraced the cloud but has also accepted the importance of Linux there. Windows could have continued with its own form of containers, but it's now embraced Docker.

Microsoft is well positioned to give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud market, but it needs to break away from its Microsoft-centric approach. Seeing as how the cloud has been tied to digital transformation, and seeing as how more businesses are embarking on digital transformation projects, it makes perfect sense to me that cloud has been one of the hot topics at Microsoft's Ignite conference for enterprise IT, taking place this week in Atlanta. Microsoft has an interesting position in cloud, in that it was simultaneously early and late to the market. Almost 20 years ago, Microsoft launched Bing, and to support it, the company had to build out a massively scalable, global cloud network. Google had done this with its search platform, and Amazon had done similar to support its e-commerce business.